What to say about ... A Doll's House

You don't need to go to the Donmar to discover that Gillian Anderson is ravishing, Christopher Eccleston is menacing and Ibsen's play has been bent out of shape in a new version. Here's what the critics thought

What to say about ... A Doll's House

You don't need to go to the Donmar to discover that Gillian Anderson is ravishing, Christopher Eccleston is menacing and Ibsen's play has been bent out of shape in a new version. Here's what the critics thought

You know Ibsen's domestic drama A Doll's House? Well, pretend you do. Now imagine it has been radically rewritten. Disgraceful, I know! The critics couldn't agree with you more. It's like taking your favourite grandfather up to Top Man and dressing him in skinny jeans. And yet those groovy cats at the Donmar Warehouse have had a go regardless.

Our man in the stalls, Michael Billington, takes up the story. "Zinnie Harris sets Ibsen's most famous domestic drama in 1909 London," he splutters. "Nora's husband, Thomas Vaughan, is no longer a bank manager but a newly appointed cabinet minister ... [And] most radically Ibsen's blackmailing lawyer, Krogastad ... has here been turned into Neil Kelman: a disgraced politician who wants Nora to use her influence on her husband to restore his public fortunes." If you're going to try repeating all that, just remember: London instead of Norway, 1909 instead of 1879 and politics (with topical overtones) instead of banking.

And, you guessed it, it is the unanimous opinion of the critics – or at least the ones I read – that Harris has not improved on the original. "The actual result of her tinkering is to make Ibsen's play resemble a dressy melodrama," Billington complains. The new version is "at once topical and trite," says Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard. "If anything, it works against the play. And there are real problems of credibility." He lists four, which is a lot.

At the beginning of his review, the Telegraph's Charles Spencer declares that "I don't approve of rewriting the classics," which means we know where he stands. So you can imagine the purple-cheeked fury with which he must have received the programme where "poor old Henrik has to share the authorship credit with Zinnie Harris". (That's Henrik Ibsen, by the way. But you can pretend you already knew.) Needless to say, he too finds that "Harris's hubristic adaptation ... isn't much cop." While even Michael Coveney, who enjoyed his evening the most, concedes that it was "only a partially successful transposition" which "didn't really need the political patina".

Coveney also complains, as does almost everybody else, about Harris's tin ear for Edwardian dialogue. "Lines like, 'I've got him by his testicles,' sound distinctly odd," he murmurs, while Billington takes exception to "I've screwed the Vaughans" and Spencer doubts "whether any respectable woman in 1909 would have publicly described her late husband as 'the old sod' in polite society". Though pop philologist Hitchings stays silent on the matter, so perhaps there is a reasonable explanation somewhere.

The Donmar is to theatres what the Ivy is to restaurants, so you're unlikely to get a seat inside. But you can still read all about the celebrities on stage. "Toby Stephens is excellent as Thomas," says Billington. "[Tara] Fitzgerald is subtle," says Hitchings, adding that "[Christopher] Eccleston, though miscast, exudes virile menace". And simply everybody fancies Gillian Anderson as Nora. They don't actually call her "fragrant", but you can hear them thinking it – and some more vulgar things besides. Probably best to leave those out, in fact, when you pass these opinions off as your own.